Here's to You, Jessie's Girl

“See that guy over there?” asks my friend Carol, “He’s looking at you.” She directs my attention toward a totally hot guy several rows down and to the left in the crowded student section at the Rose Bowl, and I think, surely he must be looking at some girl beyond me but no, he seems to be looking directly at me and he nods that YES it is YOU that I want to get the attention of and I smile extra big and shake my blue and gold pom-poms with a little added vigor.

  He's really good-looking, you know like a cross between Rick Springfield back when he coveted Jesse’s Girl and Keanu Reeves in Point Break. I crushed on a guy who looked just like him in High School, an upper classman for whom I re-routed my path from Chemistry class, knowing he took the south stairs to woodshop between third and fourth period. I desperately hoped he’d notice me in that crowded stairwell even though I risked being tardy for English every single unrequited day for at least four forlorn months of sophomore year.

  His doppelganger was the dude of my dreams first semester of college. I knew the spot where he and his soccer teammates perched along a stone wall in the quad after lunch. I’d plant myself under a spacious oak pretending to read The Iliad or Heart of Darkness while tempering my Great Expectations, hoping that the bubbly blonde bookworm image I was cultivating from my mossy perch was just his type.

   A couple years later, over the shoulder of the tattooed bouncer reading Helter Skelter under the arched gates at the Cat and Fiddle on Sunset Blvd, I caught a glimpse of yet another Rick-Keanu-type, and I kept him in my peripheral vision as I walked past the courtyard fountain to the bar for a classy glass of white zinfandel "with just one ice cube, please." I was plotting my approach when a hot redhead in a black bustier wrapped her arms around him. Turns out it actually was Keanu. My dream of a love connection again shattered.

  Now, on this warm fall football day in LA, I am cheering my heart out like I’m still that girl rerouting her way to English class, or the one holding Homer upside down under an oak tree or she who sought a soulmate on the Sunset Strip.

  This Rick-Keanu dude in a UCLA t-shirt and faded jeans, stands out amidst the fraternity bros and perky girls in short pleated skirts with shirts falling off their shoulders like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. My friend Carol elbows me and insists that we should have gotten our own short skirts from Forever 21. We’d fit right in.

  But we don’t really fit in, because Carol is my son’s girlfriend’s mother and we’re in the student section for homecoming because we’re cheap we used our kids’ DEN-PASSES after a professor, who clearly didn’t care about rivalry football games, scheduled an extra-credit seminar. We didn’t want their tickets to go to waste, AND we felt ripped off that four quarters of their college experience had been lost to the pandemic. Likewise, WE'D lost four quarters of being Bruin moms. We were determined to make the most of THEIR senior year.

   Of course, I should be proud that my son and his girlfriend are so committed to academic excellence. Young Suzanne would have skipped the seminar, gone to the game, and would likely be sloshed and splashing beer down her forearms like so many of the young people currently stumbling up and down the cement steps by our aisle seats.

  But that adorable guy, he really is trying to get my attention, and I’m thinking MAYBE in my ripped jeans and sunglasses, from a distance, JUST MAYBE I’m passing for a co-ed. I AM sporting fresh new highlights and cool converse kicks, and I’m shaking my pom-poms with the muscle memory of the High School mascot I once was. Sometimes I forget that I am no longer living in my evanescent youth while at the same time forgetting why I went into whatever room I find myself in. In my heart, I am still that vibrant girl even when the mirror - and my memory - tell a distinctly different story.

  I smile back at Rick-Keanu as Paul Simon begins to hum in my head, “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson,” and I realize that I am not only old enough to be this kid’s mother, I am old enough to be the mother of Anne Bancroft when she was IN The Graduate. She was only 36 when she played the 46-year-old seductress to Dustin Hoffman’s college-aged Benjamin Braddock. How can women EVER measure up when even older women are portrayed by actresses in their 30s?!

  And now that I’m back in the real world, I really pay attention to what Rick-Keanu is actually trying to communicate to me. He points and seems genuinely concerned, and I simultaneously turn to look behind me and stand up just in time to see the girl in the bleacher seat one row up with her head in her hands throw up, narrowly missing the back of my calves, the hot dog and chili she must have eaten at a pre-game tailgate party cover the bench I was just sitting on. I feel like a fool for even briefly entertaining the possibility that there was anything else going on but am thankful for the not-flirty persistence of Rick-Keanu saving my hair and sweatshirt AND the second half of the game for us.

  Carol and I rush to the bathroom, and while we walk up the cement stairs, I shake my pom-pom into my hand and quickly realize that it was definitely in the splash zone and I now have vomit all over my fingers. I throw my pom-poms in a trashcan and thoroughly wash my hands, catching a glimpse of myself in the Rose Bowl bathroom mirror, the polarized lenses of my sunglasses reflect back a woman who has earned every crease around her smile and every sun-kissed spot on those now very clean hands. We wander to unoccupied seats in a more civilized section of the stadium, pom-pomless, but still percolating with our perpetual youthful spirit.

As shared at Story Salon on February 26, 2025 when the theme was "Are You Flirting With Me?"